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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 08:11am Dec 24, 2002 EST (# 6983 of 6987)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

I'll be putting this up on my web site, but I think it is worth posting this here. If more Americans knew these ideas, and used them more often, more problems would be soluble, and soluble more simply and more gracefully.

Because these ideas generalize a lot of thought - over centuries - and a lot of discussion connected to the Stanford's Program on Values Technology, Science and Society over more than twenty years. Problems in applying the Golden Rule in the detail it really takes would be easier to solve. Problems in fitting human arrangements to Maslow's heirarchy of needs would be easier to solve. Problems of fitting human arrangements into harmony with Berle's laws of Power would be easier to solve.

If people in the Arab world, and in other cultural worlds, knew these things, and used them - they'd be more able to handle their problems - and more able to communicate among themselves, and with people in other cultural worlds, including ours.

rshow55 - 08:14am Dec 24, 2002 EST (# 6984 of 6987)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Hypothesis, Guidelines, Dicta, and Queries Appendix C of Conceptual Foundations for Multidisciplinary Thinking by Stephen Jay Kline Stanford University Press, 1995

HYPOTHESES

Hypothesis I: The possibility of multidisciplinary discourse. Meaningful multidisciplinary discourse is possible.

Hypothesis II: Honor all credible data. In multidisciplinary work, we need to honor all credibile data, wherever they arise. (This includes not only data from various disciplines and from our laboratories, but also from the world itself, since we have no labs from which we can obtain data for many important purposes.

Hypothesis III: The absence of universal approaches. There is no one view, no one methodology, no one set of principles, no one set of equations that provides understanding of all matters vital to human concern.

Hypothesis IV: The necessity of system definition. Each particular truth assertion about nature implies only to some systems (and not to all.)

rshow55 - 08:15am Dec 24, 2002 EST (# 6985 of 6987)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Hypothesis V. The need for at least three views. Part A. At least three views are needed for a reasonably good understanding of heirarchically structured systems with interfaces of mutual constraint: synoptic, piecewise, and structural.

Hypothesis V. The need for at least three views. Part B. Hierarchically structured systems with interfaces of mutual constraint are both common enough and significant enough so that all three views are necessary in order to understand the full range of situations and processes that are vital to humans.

. Polanyi's Hypothesis, Part A. In many heirarchical systems, adjacent levels mutually constrain, but do not determine, each other.

. Polanyi's Hypothesis, Part B. In hierarchicallys structured systems, the levels of control (usually upper levels) "harness" the lower levels and cause them to carry out behaviors that the lower levels, left to themselves, would not do.

Hypothesis VI: Empiricism in Hierarchical Structure. In order to provide an adequate empirical base, we must make observations at all levels of concern for the class of systems under study.

Hypothesis VII: The principle of Consistency: In systems with hierarchical structure and levels that mutually constrain one another, solutions must satisfy the principles and the data in all the relevant levels and fields of knowledge. The same is true for systems studied by more than one field when the dimensions of the various fields are exogenous with each other.

Hypothesis VII. Corollary A. When solutions from more than one level in a heirarchical structure with interfaces of mutual constrain provide results for a given behavior in the same system, then the results must be consistent where they overlap. If the results are not consistent, then we must seek the source of the error, and not argue that one level of one discipline governs (or has priority over) the other. The same remark applies when two disciplines give overlapping results and have some primary dimensions exogenous to each other.

Durham's Hypothesis: Genetic information and cultural information are two seperate, interacting sources of human information; each evolves over time, but at different rates of change. Addition (by SJ Kline) Human skills form a third type of human information which interacts with the other two. Skills are necessary for the maintenance of human societies over time. Skills are socially transmitted.

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